Tales of Hoards and Swordfighters in Early Bronze Age Scandinavia: The Brand New and the Broken

Abstract

This article focuses on the complexity of Early Bronze Age weapon depositions. While some of the deposited weapons have been disabled by intentional breakage, others seem to be more or less unused. A plausible explanation for the variability is that the surrender of lethal weapons to land or water was a means of coping with their power or agency – their individuality. We suggest that weapons, in their capacity as extensions of warriors’ bodies, may have substituted for humans in ritual depositions. The metalworkers also come into play, due to their capacities in the processes of making weapons and shaping weapon technologies. Although we consider the three depositions that we discuss to relate to rituals on the occasion of warfare, we are not aiming for a uniform explanation. In the same way as the patterned human behaviour of a ritual is a means of subsuming individual events into a greater order, so a focus on general patterns may subsume the complexity of the past by ignoring the many different events leading to, e.g., the deposition of metalwork. Far from seeing these perspectives as contradictory, we try to use three well-documented individual cases to shed light on the variability within the pattern.